Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

You are interested in photography and you want to get serious about it by setting your camera to capture photos and save them in RAW so that you can extract the quintessence of it later on. But now you have to find a software to use these files. You know Adobe Photoshop, which may be able to help you. But there is even better… We want to talk about Adobe Lightroom.

If you haven’t done so, we invite you to read our articles Image development and You are or want to become a photographer… Why do you need a processing software ?. These articles will help you understand the interest of a software like Adobe Lightroom and will show you the different steps that will lead you to the success of your photos.

But let’s get to the heart of the matter… Adobe Lightroom is photo post-production software developed by Adobe and included in the Creative Cloud Suite (see our article Adobe Creative Cloud suite for more information). It is also available on its own or as part of a bundle with Adobe Photoshop. You can get Lightroom for your computer as a Windows or macOS version, or as a free version on Android and iOS for your mobile devices. The latter are, however, lighter in functionality. It is necessary to distinguish at this stage between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic. The first one is a version that highlights the backup features in the Cloud and its availability across all your devices. The second is a derivative of older versions of Lightroom that is only available on computers and does not have the storage features of the first.

Adobe Lightroom is therefore a software that allows you to rework and store your photographs. The software is based on a principle of cursors allowing you to adjust in a predefined range the different parameters of your image. Thus, you can control its luminosity, its brightness or the different color settings such as hue or saturation. You also have tools for attenuating image noise, cropping your photos to make certain elements of your image disappear or rotating it to straighten your shot.

In Lightroom, you will also find a way to remove elements from your image or decide that the different settings we talked about earlier should only apply to one part of your image. This allows you, for example, to correct the brightness only on the darkest parts of the image in order to make details reappear. Of course, this will only work if your image is not “burned”, i.e. too exposed on these areas. All the adjustments you will make to your image will be available in real time on all your devices thanks to the saving of your photos in the Cloud. This function also allows you to go back to a previous version of your image if you wish to cancel all or part of the retouching performed.

If you don’t want to waste time on image retouching, you can choose from dozens of predefined settings to automatically apply a correction profile. You can also save your own presets for later use or import new ones by downloading those from professionals, for example.

But Adobe Lightroom also lets you share your photos either by using them to create web content through Adobe Spark or by transferring them to Adobe Portfolio for publication on your website. You can also take advantage of this opportunity to share them on social networks.

You wouldn’t want to lose your photos, would you ? What if in addition to securing them, you have access to these photos at all times? As we’ve said before, Adobe Lightroom is a storage system for your photos because saving and accessing them are important elements to ensure that you keep them and that everyone around you benefits from your work. Adobe Lightroom allows you to associate notes and markers so you can more easily find your images later. But Adobe Lightroom also takes advantage of the capabilities of Adobe Sensei (see our article Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence to serve creation for more information), which can scan your photos and identify their content, allowing you to display relevant search results even on unclassified and unidentified photos.

There would be a lot to say about Lightroom, but we can’t go into more detail about these features. Adobe offers a set of step-by-step tutorials to help you discover all the features of the software and learn how to use them. If you’re a beginner, you’ll quickly learn the various parameters of an image and, above all, practice will allow you to realize the effects of your settings on the final rendering. All you have to do is experiment…